Creation from Chaos

The Greek account of creation is a family history, not a workshop. Hesiod's Theogony, the fullest surviving version, does not ask who made the world. It asks what came to be first, and answers with a list of beings who arrive one after another, some alone and some in pairs.

This page follows that sequence to its first turning point, the wound that ends the reign of Sky. Other tellings differ on the very first step. Aristophanes gives the birds an egg, Apollodorus begins with Sky, and Ovid begins with a lump of matter and a craftsman.

Hesiod names four first powers and gives none of them a parent: Chaos, Gaia, Tartarus and Eros. Earth is the firm footing of the gods on Olympus. Tartarus lies deep inside her. Eros is the force that will drive every union to come, and Hesiod says he overcomes the mind and counsels of gods and men alike.

The first births come from Chaos, and they come without a mate. Erebus and black Night are born from it, and then Night, joined in love to Erebus, bears Aether and Day. Darkness produces light in this scheme, and the opening of the poem reads less like physics than like a kinship chart.

Earth now acts on her own account. She bears starry Heaven equal to herself, so that he may cover her on every side and be a lasting home for the blessed gods. She bears the long hills, where the Nymphs live in the glens, and she bears Pontus, the barren sea, without any union of love.

Only then does she lie with Ouranos. Their children are Oceanus, the Titans, the Cyclopes and the three Hundred-Handers. Hesiod says the youngest Titan, Kronos, was the wily one and hated his father. Ouranos hated the Hundred-Handers and hid them in a secret place of Earth as each was born, and would not let them into the light.

Apollodorus tells the motive differently. In his Library, Sky bound the Cyclopes and cast them into Tartarus, and Earth was grieved at the destruction of her children. He gives the sickle as adamantine. Evelyn-White's Hesiod translates the same material as grey flint.

Earth groaned within and shaped a great sickle. She put her plan to her sons and told them to punish their father's outrage. Fear held all of them silent except Kronos, who said he would do it. Earth hid him in ambush, and when Sky came at night to lie upon her, Kronos struck.

The act ends the first divine reign, and Hesiod counts its consequences at once. The drops of blood that Earth received became the Erinyes, the armoured Giants and the ash-tree Nymphs called Meliae. Sky named his other sons the Titans, meaning Strainers, and said vengeance for their deed would come. That threat is the seed of the Titanomachy.

What fell into the sea drifted for a long time, and white foam gathered around it. In the foam a maiden grew. She came first to Cythera and then to Cyprus, and gods and men called her Aphrodite, the foam-born. Eros went with her, and Desire followed. The sea that Earth had made alone now gives the goddess of love her birth.

Aristophanes gives a comic, older-than-Zeus version in the Birds. His chorus says there was only Chaos, Night, dark Erebus and deep Tartarus. Earth, air and heaven did not yet exist. Night laid a germless egg in Erebus, and from it, after long ages, Eros with golden wings was born. Eros mated with Chaos in Tartarus and hatched the birds, and only later did Eros mix the elements that made Heaven, Ocean, Earth and the gods. The chorus uses this to argue that birds are older than the Olympians. It is a parody with a purpose, and it is not Hesiod.

Ovid opens his Metamorphoses with a Roman version. Chaos there is a shapeless mass in which the elements fight each other. "God, or kindly Nature", in the Perseus English translation, ends the strife by separating land from sky and sea from land, and Ovid admits that he does not know which god it was. The tale then goes on to living things and to humans, which the Theogony never does.